Dear Square-Enix. Please preemptively stabilize servers.

[Glaereth]

Here's hoping the 24 hour maintenance period they just announced includes preparing for this issue. >.<;;

[Noshpan]

I'm sure that even now that they're taking every measure they can think of to prepare for early access and official launch. However, they won't know if their preparations are enough until the time comes.

[Eidolon]

You know that SE is going to "Fail to foresee just how many people would be signing into the game at once." They're good, but they never think things through. ): I'll be genuinly impressed if they don't have to take down the servers for "Emergency maintenence" within the first 3 days (early access.)

[Ophie-Mio]

Some people clearly have the right idea about what's going to happen. Yea, SE knows based off its pre-orders alone just how many people are going to be hitting these servers at first...and then the massive flood of the actual release.

Will it stop the game from being the most unstable, Queue-intensive, hair pulling aggravation that all expansions tend to be? No. It's why people were telling others on the forums who had taken off work for the first days of the expansion that they would want to rethink that. Everyone knows that first days of the expansions are the worst. For every login, there's ten being booted off and then maintenances to fix bugs/add in content that are shooting out the batunga.

SE can't stabilize the server for an expansion. They can hardly do it when it's just running normally. The first day is gonna be rough and better learn that now and figure out other things to do while you deal with that frustration.

You know that SE is going to "Fail to foresee just how many people would be signing into the game at once." They're good, but they never think things through. ): I'll be genuinly impressed if they don't have to take down the servers for "Emergency maintenence" within the first 3 days (early access.)

See? This person knows exactly how it's gonna be.

[Kukajoo]

they're doing everything they can but no matter how you hash it problems are bound to arise

[Zfz]

what happened at laugh of arr???

At launch, there was no separation of Data Center Groups, so...(this is from memory, details may differ but should serve to give you a picture of what happened)

• Everyone in the whole world would connect to the same Login Lobby server.
• Everyone's game client tries to look up both the JP data center server listing and the NA data center server listing. But often, due to congestion, one of the listing lookup would time-out, and many people were stuck in the situation where they want to play on the NA data center but only successfully looked up the JP server list. You repeat the lookup step until you successfully looked up the listing for your intended data center.
• Then you create your character and try to enter the world. But due to congestion, you are placed in a login queue. Sadly, the queue has a small size, and if you try to enter the world when the queue is full, you don't even get into the queue. You just get thrown back to the START GAME screen, from where you would need to choose START GAME and then your character, then "YES" to try entering the world again. Loop back to the queue is full phase.

Some people were so tired of the loop they kept the keypad 0 key held down (which would select START GAME and try to log in with the last character you used) and went to do other stuff. I remember holding down my numpad 0 key and slumping in my chair, closing my eyes listening to the sound effect of that loop...

...so people decided to not log out even if they go to work, which made the matter worse, it was so bad that an auto-logout for AFK players was implemented urgently.

[Zumi]

It starts at 2am not that many people will be on.

[Sylve]

What a lot of people fail to understand is that the servers are going to be doing exactly what they're doing right now during Early Access.

Yes, for sure there will be MORE people online during Early Access than in the final weeks before Launch, but the logins are going to spike after maintenance and then smooth out over the weekend, then spike again on Launch Day.
During ARRs launch, you had everyone slamming the one Login Server, but as others have pointed out, that system has been changed. Hardware has been upgraded.

I predict some Zero Hour instability followed by smooth sailing. The non-Early Access folk will keep doing ARR stuff while the Early Access people will do Heavensward stuff. Load Balance. Here's hoping it works as intended.

[Gramul]

Okay...how exactly can they do that?

[Risvertasashi]

I predict some Zero Hour instability followed by smooth sailing. The non-Early Access folk will keep doing ARR stuff while the Early Access people will do Heavensward stuff. Load Balance. Here's hoping it works as intended.

Let's hope. There were those patch notes saying they made changes to the DF in preparation for the expac...